...there is a strong undercurrent which involves a *hatred* of competing products...
There is? Microsoft employs about 55,000 people internationally, so I think it's a bit hard to say their employees, homogenously, hate the competition.
In my experience, Microsoft employees don't just tolerate the competition--the appreciate it. Not only do I know firsthand that many bring competing products to work (from Powerbooks and iPods to running Firefox, Linux, Google, and similar on their office computers), but you'd be surprised at the number of Mac bumper stickeres and Linux t-shirts you see on campus (granted, not nearly as many as the number of Windows bumper stickers and Microsoft t-shirts, but what did you expect?).
I even heard Bill Gates say publicly not too long ago that SQL Server was a really interesting area because it was "fun" to not be on top, to have some truly challenging competition. I think this embodies, to a large extent, how the company works as a whole (or really how most companies work): when you're on top and it seems like nobody can touch you, it's hard to figure out what you should be doing to make your product better. This goes for Windows as well as it goes for Ford and Chevy--when everyone wanted some big old American sedan, all they made were big old American sedans. When they started noticing lost sales to the Japanese, they retaliated--albiet very belatedly--with small, fuel efficient, relatively reliable and safe cars like the Focus.
Same goes for Microsoft: up until a few years ago, they didn't have any sort of secure practices, because they (apparently) didn't see why it mattered. They didn't do a lot of things, and people scratched their heads about what the big difference was between NT and 2K, or 2K and XP. But when they feel threatened, they don't just, as many Slashdotters would say, attack the competition--they try to figure out what to do better.
So to make a very long answer short, I don't think most Microsoft employees hate the competition--I think most have a healthy respect for it. It's not too hard to find the exception, and I suppose that's a bit understandable--when someone's paying your bill, stupid loyalties might get in the way of your better judgement. But as a whole, Microsoft has a healthy respect for the competition; the management know nobody's on top forever and the employees know that for every problem, there may be a different solution.
True, but the goal of the Xbox 360 is presumably to sell Media Center type devices. It's low margin if you make the hardware, but if you only make the software--which was not only discussed in relation to the 360, but already happens for Media Center PCs--you're back in comfortable territory.
This is similar to what MS does with Mobile. They don't make the mobile devices; they make the OS for them. This means no concerns about shipping inventory, gambling on production to meet expected demand, or anything like that. The only real problem is that Mobile and Xbox just don't make money.
Microsoft is certainly aware of the benefits of being a software company, and that's why Xbox is nearly unique as a hardware offering. The above is basically regurgitated Ballmer-talk--this is why MS makes a mobile OS but not a mobile device, and why, long term,the Xbox seems such an anomoly. Do they plan to eventually just license the software to manufacturers with certified boxes? Or is giving away the hardware and charging for the software just a natural extension of their current model, only one where they subsidize the cost of the platform (simply because no manufacturer currently provides one that's suitable)?
Half the time, Microsoft is criticized by analysts for not investing enough money in new ventures and for sitting on such piles of cash. If I were a stockholder, I'd be torn between wanting that money back as a dividend and seeing it invested in potential gold mines.
For a company this rich, investing money in a new market is hardly stupid.
I think currently this is simply a non-issue. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've never heard of a root certificate compromise being used, in the wild, for phishing attacks.
And for good reason; it's simply not necessary. Users don't notice if the site has SSL or if it's at the wrong URL; why bother with faking a SSL cert and poisoning a DNS cache when you can just get one for russianhacker.com and send spam telling people to visit you at that site?
Er, you can do that in most browsers. In OSX, you can add the certificate to your Keychain to avoid being prompted about it in Safari or Mail; in Firefox, can't you hit "don't warn me again"?
Certainly, it's just a component of the browser, and some support this feature already.
You might want to read about Blue Hat--in recent years, MS has made a strong effort to make closer ties with (and, hopefully, learn something from) independent security researchers.
It's not quite the same as meeting with open source projects, but it's a start.
He's not a prick; he's a troll. What he says makes no sense, but he manages to get people to pay attention to him anyway.
The thing I really love about ESR is that he claims to be the "unofficial spokesman for the open source community." Well, shit! There's a community? And he's my spokesman? I didn't get the memo!
And yet the only source code I remember seeing from him is fetchmail and a tiny Python script to automatically submit to Freshmeat. Could it be that it's a lot more fun to rant and rave about open source than to sit down and actually write some?
Yeah, and personally, I use Python and OCaml quite a lot more than I use Java. But--though I wasn't explicit--I meant languages with industry acceptance. Sure, Galois might use OCaml, Python gets some use in the Web, and Mac developeres use Objective C, but none of those are languages that enjoy wide acceptance, disappointing as that is. None of those have anywhere near Java's penetration, making Java quite a bit more successful than the original poster claimed.
Also, in my experience few people actually use the OO features of OCaml.;)
You are wrong. While basic console applications may run with little or no modification on one or the other (those same applications, incidentally, should run fine on Windows, either using MS's Services for Unix or Cygwin--NT has POSIX-standard syscalls, I believe) but anything more complex (threads, GUI applications, etc) may not.
Namely, a lot of obscure syscalls on Solaris, BSD, and Linux are OS-specific and incompatible, and at least OSX uses an entirely different (and almost entirely incompatible) GUI (Cocoa applications can perhaps be ported to OpenSTEP, but they're hardly "happily" shared to those other OSes) as well as a number of other OS-specific libraries (CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreAudio...). Essentially, OSX-native code will not run on Linux or BSD any more than Windows-native code will.
First, Java, while not as successful as Sun hoped (what is?) hardly "failed miserably." Prior to C#, what other options were there for object oriented, garbage collected high level languages? People used C++, which, while in some ways stronger than Java, is hardly comparable. Java (partly) filled a void that, hopefully, C# will fill in an even more convincing way.
Second, machine independent bytecode isn't really the crux of the issue, I don't think. I say this for two reasons; first, x86 is pretty much the standard at this point (I say this from a G4 Powerbook, but with Apple and Sun shipping x86 machines, the desktop, workstation, and much of the server market seems to be going x86); second, any language with cross platform libraries and compilers is "write once, run anywhere;" VMs are only interesting (in the context of compatibility) insofar as they are "compile once, run anywhere."
The OS is already a hardware abstraction layer; it allows you to ignore what kind of I/O devices someone has, what size their disk is, how much RAM they have, and so forth. The technology to write code that works across multiple platforms was realized decades ago, and we use it daily. The only reason we're still talking about this is essentially an economic one--while each OS is an implementation of a standardized hardware abstraction layer, there are simply multiple OSes, which means multiple standards. The obvious solution to this is to be able to a) run multiple standards on one machine (either by running multiple OSes or by an OS that is compatible with, or emulates, the syscalls and libraries of another OS) or b) use a higher level language (like Java) that has its own standard and its own abstraction layer for each OS it is compatible with.
In other words, standardizing platforms is easy; getting people to agree on a given standard is hard. Being compatible with multiple standards is a good bit less hard, and we've been doing that for at least a decade as well.
I assume you are referencing the default user not having root access. The thing is, this doesn't really count for anything.
Things you could do with user-level access:
* Read, modify, and delete all the user's files (credit card info, bank statements, love letters, porn...) * Have a malicious program execute on startup * Replace applications with malicious binaries (if the user is in the "admin" group) * Run a backdoor, spam proxy, or other network software
Things you would need root for: * Accessing other users' data (most Macs are probably single-user anyway) * Modifying the kernel
I'm honestly not sure if you could run a keylogger with user-level access, but my suspicion is you could. So, yeah, separation of privileges is great. Why is that, again?
The standard in Anglo common law (i.e. that in use in the UK and the US) is called "mutual consideration." For a contract to be binding, both parties must not just agree to it, but they must both give something (the "consideration") to the other party. In other words, a contract that says, "You agree to buy me lunch" is not valid; a contract that says, "You agree to buy me lunch and in exchange I agree to beat the first level of Halo 2 for you" is valid.
In this case, though, software licenses are generally considered limited grants for the right of use of the software; the consideration given by the publisher is the right to the software; the consideration given by the user is the waiving of liability as well as the other limitations (agreeing not to disassemble, use in anti-spyware research, etc). They are certainly of somewhat iffy legal status due to the fuzzy nature of the agreement, but they can be binding.
I used to wonder if software that had not been purchased--such as free software or software given as a gift--could not result in a binding contract, since the user had not paid anything, but I believe waiving certain rights and agreeing to the limitations in the EULA is enough.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer. So this is just my understanding.
Maintainability and readability is not just about documentation or semicolons or Hungarian notation (incidentally, that is to be avoided at all costs;) ). I was meaning more things like function length, intuitive use of common idioms, function and variable names and declarations, etc. Point being that these important qualities aren't really measured in your CS grade. That's all.
For the record, I'm a reformed Perl user who now relies often on Python.;)
I'm not sure why you seem to think that graphical IDEs are synonymous with high level programming languages. VisualStudio can be used to write C (and probably ASM, too), for one thing, and all mainstream languages still are tied to plain text source--meaning you can use Notepad if you'd like, even to write Java, C#, Lisp, or Haskell (to name a few high level languages).
If you don't like higher level programming languages (I'm not really sure why you wouldn't--and in my experience, most people who say "I like to be close to the machine" are really just idiots who think they're too smart for automatic memory management), that's fine, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to this discussion.
In my experience, very few university assignments are graded on style--most solely consider the functionality of the end result (and could be graded with hardly a look at the source code).
Have you gotten high marks on the maintainability or readability of your code?
That's an unwarranted assumption. I can't stand C and C++. I'm doing most of my important coding in OCaml right now, and most of my smaller, fun stuff in Python. Neither are, I think, what you'd think of as particularly tedious languages.
But this points out something interesting: the philosophy behind Python is, for the most part, about paring down the language and weeding out seldom-used constructs that only serve to confuse without enhancing the expressiveness of the code (I do take issue with the apparent decision to remove lambdas, but there is a good justification for it). In other words, for a Pythonista, there's usually only one way to do it.
It works pretty much the same way in most other languages, though. Most of the time, you re-use common idioms. Just as in human languages, you rarely put together individual words in unusual combinations (but rather you assemble common phrases to get the right meaning), so too with most programming.
I'm not saying there isn't a creative element to programming. But it's the same creative element that exists in being a contract lawyer, say--you certainly have to specialize the contract for this task, and sometimes (especially at the upper crust of contract law) the task is quite interesting and new, but most of the time it's just rote rewriting of some common template.
Who said anything about "thinking outside the box"? The original poster highlighted how both activities involve strict, "clearly defined rulesets;" just as in Dungeons and Dragons your level 5 elf can't defeat the level 10 goblin king (OK, I admit it, I've never actually played the game), in any (good) programming language your int value can't be treated as a double without casting. There's no "thinking outside the box" in which you can ignore the type system, ignore the rules, or what have you. Most of the time (especially for real grunt-level code-monkeys), the "better" coder is the one who's best at putting together clearly defined idioms that obey rules of legibility and clarity. Programming, most of the time, is not free-form poetry--it's writing a newspaper headline, a legally binding contract, or at best a poem in hexamic pentameter.
I'm not sure there is a corelation between coding and role playing, but if there is, I would suspect societal pressure fare more than anything else. Do non-Western coders also enjoy role playing games? Or is that just Americans and Europeans who buy into the whole image of the fat geek drinking lots of caffeine and hacking on his Linux machine in between rounds of D&D? Slashdot, of course, would not be the place to explore this possibility.
Also, as an addendum, I don't think I made it clear that what you say simply doesn't match the facts. As far as I know (from reading the Wikipedia entry), the Gates Foundation doesn't give any Windows software as part of their donations--they give cash. So your nonsense about pressing more CDs as a tax deduction is, well, just plain wrong.
Then again, this is Slashdot. Perhaps I was being a bit optimistic to expect otherwise.
I suppose that's why they give most of their money to world health, immunization, and other projects, right? Because once you get the third world up to speed in terms of things like fresh drinking water and protection from easily curable diseases, they're just a wider user base for Microsoft Office?
Cut me a break. If the Gates Foundation were about being a "crack dealer" for MS products, they wouldn't spend most of their money on providing basic health in third world countries that neither buy not can even afford Microsoft products to begin with.
How's that tin foil hat fit, anyway?
Re:Names have been changed, addiction is real...
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
You wrote, "I was ok with porn too till I found out some stuff about people in my family to do with sexual immorality and the pain still remains."
So, yeah. I was being a little facetious when I said your mom was a porn star. But someone in your family did something you didn't like, and suddenly sexual liberation is all wrong. Do I get the drift right?
Re:Names have been changed, addiction is real...
on
Pornified
·
· Score: 1
You wrote, "If, for instance, you were into softcore porn, it is only a matter of time before you will try hardcore... soon you will not only want to see it online, you will also want to try this for yourself." The clear implication is that wanting to try the sort of acts often shown in hardcore porn is wrong. As long as those acts are consensual (and in my experience, rape porn is an incredibly small subset of hardcore porn), what exactly do you see wrong with this, other than that it's "deviant"? This is where from I drew the assumption that you see "deviant" sex acts as inherently wrong.
As to morals being wrong, I think you may've misunderstood me. I have no problem with morality; I have a problem with subjective prejudice biasing supposed science. Unfortunately, many in the religious right (even if you do not count yourself among them) have realized that simply saying "The Bible says that the earth is 6,000 years old" or "The Bible says that porn is wrong" (regardless of whether it does or not) is not enough to convince the voting public, so they turn to bad science instead.
But I think you need to rethink your last argument there. True, you don't need data to show that in your one anecdotal instance, your feelings were hurt when your mom became a porn star (speaking of which, this thread is useless without pics). What you haven't adequately explained is why that is a matter of law or social policy. Without data to back the claims that there is a seriously detrimental effect on society from porn, there is no compelling government interest, which means no reason or means to abridge the First Amendment.
I think you ought to learn a little more about Constitutional law (and science) before you try to have this argument. But sorry about your mom. Was she hot?
PS: I'd go so far as to reckon a guess that perhaps your own prejudices, not your mom's professional activities, are to blame for your own hurt feelings. Free your mind.
Slashdot Mirror
...there is a strong undercurrent which involves a *hatred* of competing products...
There is? Microsoft employs about 55,000 people internationally, so I think it's a bit hard to say their employees, homogenously, hate the competition.
In my experience, Microsoft employees don't just tolerate the competition--the appreciate it. Not only do I know firsthand that many bring competing products to work (from Powerbooks and iPods to running Firefox, Linux, Google, and similar on their office computers), but you'd be surprised at the number of Mac bumper stickeres and Linux t-shirts you see on campus (granted, not nearly as many as the number of Windows bumper stickers and Microsoft t-shirts, but what did you expect?).
I even heard Bill Gates say publicly not too long ago that SQL Server was a really interesting area because it was "fun" to not be on top, to have some truly challenging competition. I think this embodies, to a large extent, how the company works as a whole (or really how most companies work): when you're on top and it seems like nobody can touch you, it's hard to figure out what you should be doing to make your product better. This goes for Windows as well as it goes for Ford and Chevy--when everyone wanted some big old American sedan, all they made were big old American sedans. When they started noticing lost sales to the Japanese, they retaliated--albiet very belatedly--with small, fuel efficient, relatively reliable and safe cars like the Focus.
Same goes for Microsoft: up until a few years ago, they didn't have any sort of secure practices, because they (apparently) didn't see why it mattered. They didn't do a lot of things, and people scratched their heads about what the big difference was between NT and 2K, or 2K and XP. But when they feel threatened, they don't just, as many Slashdotters would say, attack the competition--they try to figure out what to do better.
So to make a very long answer short, I don't think most Microsoft employees hate the competition--I think most have a healthy respect for it. It's not too hard to find the exception, and I suppose that's a bit understandable--when someone's paying your bill, stupid loyalties might get in the way of your better judgement. But as a whole, Microsoft has a healthy respect for the competition; the management know nobody's on top forever and the employees know that for every problem, there may be a different solution.
Certain business practices associated with trusts or monopolies are illegal. Are they immoral? You're making a leap that isn't necessarily warranted.
True, but the goal of the Xbox 360 is presumably to sell Media Center type devices. It's low margin if you make the hardware, but if you only make the software--which was not only discussed in relation to the 360, but already happens for Media Center PCs--you're back in comfortable territory.
This is similar to what MS does with Mobile. They don't make the mobile devices; they make the OS for them. This means no concerns about shipping inventory, gambling on production to meet expected demand, or anything like that. The only real problem is that Mobile and Xbox just don't make money.
Microsoft is certainly aware of the benefits of being a software company, and that's why Xbox is nearly unique as a hardware offering. The above is basically regurgitated Ballmer-talk--this is why MS makes a mobile OS but not a mobile device, and why, long term,the Xbox seems such an anomoly. Do they plan to eventually just license the software to manufacturers with certified boxes? Or is giving away the hardware and charging for the software just a natural extension of their current model, only one where they subsidize the cost of the platform (simply because no manufacturer currently provides one that's suitable)?
Half the time, Microsoft is criticized by analysts for not investing enough money in new ventures and for sitting on such piles of cash. If I were a stockholder, I'd be torn between wanting that money back as a dividend and seeing it invested in potential gold mines.
For a company this rich, investing money in a new market is hardly stupid.
The FDIC is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. You mean the SEC.
I think currently this is simply a non-issue. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've never heard of a root certificate compromise being used, in the wild, for phishing attacks.
And for good reason; it's simply not necessary. Users don't notice if the site has SSL or if it's at the wrong URL; why bother with faking a SSL cert and poisoning a DNS cache when you can just get one for russianhacker.com and send spam telling people to visit you at that site?
Er, you can do that in most browsers. In OSX, you can add the certificate to your Keychain to avoid being prompted about it in Safari or Mail; in Firefox, can't you hit "don't warn me again"?
Certainly, it's just a component of the browser, and some support this feature already.
You might want to read about Blue Hat--in recent years, MS has made a strong effort to make closer ties with (and, hopefully, learn something from) independent security researchers.
It's not quite the same as meeting with open source projects, but it's a start.
He's not a prick; he's a troll. What he says makes no sense, but he manages to get people to pay attention to him anyway.
The thing I really love about ESR is that he claims to be the "unofficial spokesman for the open source community." Well, shit! There's a community? And he's my spokesman? I didn't get the memo!
And yet the only source code I remember seeing from him is fetchmail and a tiny Python script to automatically submit to Freshmeat. Could it be that it's a lot more fun to rant and rave about open source than to sit down and actually write some?
Yeah, and personally, I use Python and OCaml quite a lot more than I use Java. But--though I wasn't explicit--I meant languages with industry acceptance. Sure, Galois might use OCaml, Python gets some use in the Web, and Mac developeres use Objective C, but none of those are languages that enjoy wide acceptance, disappointing as that is. None of those have anywhere near Java's penetration, making Java quite a bit more successful than the original poster claimed.
;)
Also, in my experience few people actually use the OO features of OCaml.
You are wrong. While basic console applications may run with little or no modification on one or the other (those same applications, incidentally, should run fine on Windows, either using MS's Services for Unix or Cygwin--NT has POSIX-standard syscalls, I believe) but anything more complex (threads, GUI applications, etc) may not.
Namely, a lot of obscure syscalls on Solaris, BSD, and Linux are OS-specific and incompatible, and at least OSX uses an entirely different (and almost entirely incompatible) GUI (Cocoa applications can perhaps be ported to OpenSTEP, but they're hardly "happily" shared to those other OSes) as well as a number of other OS-specific libraries (CoreData, CoreVideo, CoreAudio...). Essentially, OSX-native code will not run on Linux or BSD any more than Windows-native code will.
Secret APIs? If an API were secret, nobody would be able to use it to write for that platform.
First, Java, while not as successful as Sun hoped (what is?) hardly "failed miserably." Prior to C#, what other options were there for object oriented, garbage collected high level languages? People used C++, which, while in some ways stronger than Java, is hardly comparable. Java (partly) filled a void that, hopefully, C# will fill in an even more convincing way.
Second, machine independent bytecode isn't really the crux of the issue, I don't think. I say this for two reasons; first, x86 is pretty much the standard at this point (I say this from a G4 Powerbook, but with Apple and Sun shipping x86 machines, the desktop, workstation, and much of the server market seems to be going x86); second, any language with cross platform libraries and compilers is "write once, run anywhere;" VMs are only interesting (in the context of compatibility) insofar as they are "compile once, run anywhere."
The OS is already a hardware abstraction layer; it allows you to ignore what kind of I/O devices someone has, what size their disk is, how much RAM they have, and so forth. The technology to write code that works across multiple platforms was realized decades ago, and we use it daily. The only reason we're still talking about this is essentially an economic one--while each OS is an implementation of a standardized hardware abstraction layer, there are simply multiple OSes, which means multiple standards. The obvious solution to this is to be able to a) run multiple standards on one machine (either by running multiple OSes or by an OS that is compatible with, or emulates, the syscalls and libraries of another OS) or b) use a higher level language (like Java) that has its own standard and its own abstraction layer for each OS it is compatible with.
In other words, standardizing platforms is easy; getting people to agree on a given standard is hard. Being compatible with multiple standards is a good bit less hard, and we've been doing that for at least a decade as well.
I assume you are referencing the default user not having root access. The thing is, this doesn't really count for anything.
Things you could do with user-level access:
* Read, modify, and delete all the user's files (credit card info, bank statements, love letters, porn...)
* Have a malicious program execute on startup
* Replace applications with malicious binaries (if the user is in the "admin" group)
* Run a backdoor, spam proxy, or other network software
Things you would need root for:
* Accessing other users' data (most Macs are probably single-user anyway)
* Modifying the kernel
I'm honestly not sure if you could run a keylogger with user-level access, but my suspicion is you could. So, yeah, separation of privileges is great. Why is that, again?
The standard in Anglo common law (i.e. that in use in the UK and the US) is called "mutual consideration." For a contract to be binding, both parties must not just agree to it, but they must both give something (the "consideration") to the other party. In other words, a contract that says, "You agree to buy me lunch" is not valid; a contract that says, "You agree to buy me lunch and in exchange I agree to beat the first level of Halo 2 for you" is valid.
In this case, though, software licenses are generally considered limited grants for the right of use of the software; the consideration given by the publisher is the right to the software; the consideration given by the user is the waiving of liability as well as the other limitations (agreeing not to disassemble, use in anti-spyware research, etc). They are certainly of somewhat iffy legal status due to the fuzzy nature of the agreement, but they can be binding.
I used to wonder if software that had not been purchased--such as free software or software given as a gift--could not result in a binding contract, since the user had not paid anything, but I believe waiving certain rights and agreeing to the limitations in the EULA is enough.
Of course, I'm not a lawyer. So this is just my understanding.
Maintainability and readability is not just about documentation or semicolons or Hungarian notation (incidentally, that is to be avoided at all costs ;) ). I was meaning more things like function length, intuitive use of common idioms, function and variable names and declarations, etc. Point being that these important qualities aren't really measured in your CS grade. That's all.
;)
For the record, I'm a reformed Perl user who now relies often on Python.
I'm not sure why you seem to think that graphical IDEs are synonymous with high level programming languages. VisualStudio can be used to write C (and probably ASM, too), for one thing, and all mainstream languages still are tied to plain text source--meaning you can use Notepad if you'd like, even to write Java, C#, Lisp, or Haskell (to name a few high level languages).
If you don't like higher level programming languages (I'm not really sure why you wouldn't--and in my experience, most people who say "I like to be close to the machine" are really just idiots who think they're too smart for automatic memory management), that's fine, but I'm not sure how it's relevant to this discussion.
In my experience, very few university assignments are graded on style--most solely consider the functionality of the end result (and could be graded with hardly a look at the source code).
Have you gotten high marks on the maintainability or readability of your code?
That's an unwarranted assumption. I can't stand C and C++. I'm doing most of my important coding in OCaml right now, and most of my smaller, fun stuff in Python. Neither are, I think, what you'd think of as particularly tedious languages.
But this points out something interesting: the philosophy behind Python is, for the most part, about paring down the language and weeding out seldom-used constructs that only serve to confuse without enhancing the expressiveness of the code (I do take issue with the apparent decision to remove lambdas, but there is a good justification for it). In other words, for a Pythonista, there's usually only one way to do it.
It works pretty much the same way in most other languages, though. Most of the time, you re-use common idioms. Just as in human languages, you rarely put together individual words in unusual combinations (but rather you assemble common phrases to get the right meaning), so too with most programming.
I'm not saying there isn't a creative element to programming. But it's the same creative element that exists in being a contract lawyer, say--you certainly have to specialize the contract for this task, and sometimes (especially at the upper crust of contract law) the task is quite interesting and new, but most of the time it's just rote rewriting of some common template.
Gosh. I can't imagine a post more loaded with derision and smug superiority than yours.
Except for this one.
Who said anything about "thinking outside the box"? The original poster highlighted how both activities involve strict, "clearly defined rulesets;" just as in Dungeons and Dragons your level 5 elf can't defeat the level 10 goblin king (OK, I admit it, I've never actually played the game), in any (good) programming language your int value can't be treated as a double without casting. There's no "thinking outside the box" in which you can ignore the type system, ignore the rules, or what have you. Most of the time (especially for real grunt-level code-monkeys), the "better" coder is the one who's best at putting together clearly defined idioms that obey rules of legibility and clarity. Programming, most of the time, is not free-form poetry--it's writing a newspaper headline, a legally binding contract, or at best a poem in hexamic pentameter.
I'm not sure there is a corelation between coding and role playing, but if there is, I would suspect societal pressure fare more than anything else. Do non-Western coders also enjoy role playing games? Or is that just Americans and Europeans who buy into the whole image of the fat geek drinking lots of caffeine and hacking on his Linux machine in between rounds of D&D? Slashdot, of course, would not be the place to explore this possibility.
Also, as an addendum, I don't think I made it clear that what you say simply doesn't match the facts. As far as I know (from reading the Wikipedia entry), the Gates Foundation doesn't give any Windows software as part of their donations--they give cash. So your nonsense about pressing more CDs as a tax deduction is, well, just plain wrong.
Then again, this is Slashdot. Perhaps I was being a bit optimistic to expect otherwise.
I suppose that's why they give most of their money to world health, immunization, and other projects, right? Because once you get the third world up to speed in terms of things like fresh drinking water and protection from easily curable diseases, they're just a wider user base for Microsoft Office?
Cut me a break. If the Gates Foundation were about being a "crack dealer" for MS products, they wouldn't spend most of their money on providing basic health in third world countries that neither buy not can even afford Microsoft products to begin with.
How's that tin foil hat fit, anyway?
You wrote, "I was ok with porn too till I found out some stuff about people in my family to do with sexual immorality and the pain still remains."
So, yeah. I was being a little facetious when I said your mom was a porn star. But someone in your family did something you didn't like, and suddenly sexual liberation is all wrong. Do I get the drift right?
You wrote, "If, for instance, you were into softcore porn, it is only a matter of time before you will try hardcore... soon you will not only want to see it online, you will also want to try this for yourself." The clear implication is that wanting to try the sort of acts often shown in hardcore porn is wrong. As long as those acts are consensual (and in my experience, rape porn is an incredibly small subset of hardcore porn), what exactly do you see wrong with this, other than that it's "deviant"? This is where from I drew the assumption that you see "deviant" sex acts as inherently wrong.
As to morals being wrong, I think you may've misunderstood me. I have no problem with morality; I have a problem with subjective prejudice biasing supposed science. Unfortunately, many in the religious right (even if you do not count yourself among them) have realized that simply saying "The Bible says that the earth is 6,000 years old" or "The Bible says that porn is wrong" (regardless of whether it does or not) is not enough to convince the voting public, so they turn to bad science instead.
But I think you need to rethink your last argument there. True, you don't need data to show that in your one anecdotal instance, your feelings were hurt when your mom became a porn star (speaking of which, this thread is useless without pics). What you haven't adequately explained is why that is a matter of law or social policy. Without data to back the claims that there is a seriously detrimental effect on society from porn, there is no compelling government interest, which means no reason or means to abridge the First Amendment.
I think you ought to learn a little more about Constitutional law (and science) before you try to have this argument. But sorry about your mom. Was she hot?
PS: I'd go so far as to reckon a guess that perhaps your own prejudices, not your mom's professional activities, are to blame for your own hurt feelings. Free your mind.